Tag: war
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Judith Butler’s Carefully Crafted F**k You
In the current issue of the wonderful online magazine Guernica, I’ve got an interview with none other than the critical theorist Judith Butler. Her latest book, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (2009), reflects on the past decade’s saga of needless war, photographed—even fetishized—torture, and routine horror. It treats these practices as issuing from…
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What’s The Point of War?
What will it take to prevent the next war? Can’t say I know exactly, but, like how many others in the same boat, I keep writing about it anyway. I just received in the mail the elegant new second issue of The Point magazine, out of Chicago, which includes my essay “The War at Home.”…
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Life After Past Evil
In the last several decades, there have been numerous—and largely unprecedented—efforts around the world to develop and enact protocols for what to do in the wake of conflict and horror. From Nuremberg, to South Africa, to Guatemala, different models have been tried, and each bears lessons for the future. At The Immanent Frame today, I…
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Erik Prince and the Spell of Freedom
Fueled by Jeremy Scahill’s recent revelations about Blackwater and its founder Erik Prince in The Nation, I’ve got a new essay at Religion Dispatches exploring the concept of freedom in relationship to the business of free-market warfare. Erik Prince discovered a passion for freedom long before founding Blackwater. Freedom is a mighty thing. Its exercise…
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Rules of Engagement
What is the architecture of imagination that makes the horror of war seem possible, sensible, and coherent? This week at Religion Dispatches, I review a new book that takes important steps toward an answer: Antoine Bousquet’s The Scientific Way of Warfare: Order and Chaos on the Battlefields of Modernity. Soldiers stake their lives on a…
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A Country to Die For
Memorial Day as never been my favorite. In Arlington, Virginia, where I grew up, it always meant the roar of Vietnam Vets on motorcycles all day. And the occasion can bring out our most jingoistic spirit. As I passed three separate suspension bridges across the Hudson River today, each with a giant American flag hanging…
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The Defense Department Gospel
Donald Rumsfeld took the Lord’s name in vain. Today at Religion Dispatches, I discuss the documents released by GQ this weekend, cover sheets for 2003 intelligence briefings that Rumsfeld delivered to President Bush. On them, Biblical passages sit suggestively alongside scenes of desert warfare. With only the most cursory bit of investigation, I was able…
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The Original Peaceniks
My review of Joseph Kip Kosek’s Acts of Conscience appears in this week’s Commonweal. The online version is subscription-only, but the magazine is well worth picking up at your local newsstand. In his new history of Christian nonviolence from World War I to Vietnam, Joseph Kip Kosek asks what this movement has offered American democracy,…
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The Poem of Force
Some time ago, a dear friend shared with me a photocopy of some sections of Simone Weil’s essay The Iliad or The Poem of Force. I remember being haunted by those pages at the time, and I kept them in a safe and prominent place but never opened them again. Until, at least, the other…